GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was a high-end graphics card of the generation Pascal. It was released in early March 2017 and offered a 16nm GP102 core with active 3584 stream processors. Basically, it was almost a year older Titan X with a slightly narrowed memory bus and a $ 500 more favorable price tag: $ 699.
Despite this price advantage, it was still considered a relatively expensive product and its sales were ultimately the biggest kick of the generation announcement. Turing, which was even more expensive and at sale prices Pascalu offered a worse price / performance / memory capacity ratio. The GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was the most talked about at the turn of summer and autumn 2018 as a more advantageous alternative to GeForce RTX 2080. There was great interest in September and for most of October 2018, then availability fell and prices rose – probably due to production discontinuation.
Pascal GP102, photo Fritzchens Fritz
It is therefore interesting that the card with a nearly five-year-old core, which is “dead” for two and a half years, has now appeared in pieces with a production date of 2021. The first to draw attention to this fact was the well-known harukaze leaker, who claimed GeForce GTX 1080 Ti received a new piece from EVGA with this year’s production date.
It has been suggested that these are probably just a few cards made for complaint purposes, but this theory does not seem likely. On the one hand, a graphics card company does not appear to have had a high-end GPU in stock for three years, which it could sell profitably in 2018 and for which long-term storage means a drop in price. Firstly, I do not recall a single case in which a customer in a complaint would receive a new piece made in the year of the complaint 2.5 years after the end of the production of the graphics card. Finally, it can be said that the resumption of card production in the form of a few pieces for complaints – especially in the current situation – does not make sense. At a time when the $ 1000- $ 2000 card production line is busy, the company will not stop production to rebuild the line, make a few excavations to cover complaints, then rebuild and return to producing a much more profitable product. In such a situation, it makes more sense to return the customer $ 500 and instead continue to produce cards, the sale of which earns several times more than it would save to resolve the complaint in exchange (regardless of downtime).
It seems more probable that a larger batch of GA102 chips was taken somewhere, thanks to which it was cost-effective to fully restore the production of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (not to a few cards to resolve complaints). It remains unclear whether Nvidia also produced a new batch of GP102 chips (this cannot be ruled out, the 16nm TSMC process is not as busy as 7nm) and what exactly is behind the resumption of card production (meaning options such as order from OEM partner, demand from miners, plan to release cards at retail market etc.)
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